From Krypto to the Fortress of Solitude: The Creative Vision Behind James Gunn’s “Superman”
James Gunn’s Superman is the first feature film in the recently reinvigorated, rejiggered, and newly unified DC Universe under Gunn and Peter Safran’s vision, and from what we’ve seen so far, it’s about to make a huge mark in the legacy of one of the most iconic superheroes in history. Hitting theaters July 11, David Corenswet suits up as the Man of Steel with Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane. You can expect plenty of other characters to make an appearance, including Supergirl (Milly Alcock), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), the Green Lantern Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Mister Terrific (Ed Gathegi), Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), and, of course, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) among them.
From early glimpses, the visual style echoes classic Americana with a slightly retro-futuristic feel. The costume design stays true to Superman’s traditional look while updating it with modern textures and details. The iconic “S” emblem directly references the Kingdom Come comic book. Production design reflects Smallville’s heartland charm and Metropolis’ urban vibe, creating a contrast that mirrors Clark Kent’s dual identity. The visual effects team has grounded the spectacle rather than overwhelming us with CGI. And for the score, it evokes the warmth and influence of John Williams’ iconic theme but with a fresh, emotional voice. But what sets this Superman apart from previous interactions is a story that is not only epic but is filled with heart.
Below, we highlight from the film’s production notes how production design, costume design, visual effects, and score created key moments in Gunn’s Superman.
Production Designer Beth Mickle
What went into designing the Fortress of Solitude?
The Fortress of Solitude is Superman’s man cave…it’s to be a place of inspiration and a place where he works, where he’s intellectually curious, where he has his laboratories, where, in the comic books, he has a zoo with aliens that he’s gathered from around the galaxies. We wanted it to show that this is his base of operations. James at first had said it could be the Richard Donner version, he felt like that’s what audiences knew, and felt like that was familiar, but I really felt like we had the opportunity to do something different, something exciting, something we hadn’t seen before, but still honor and pay homage to the original.
So we looked at the way crystals grew and kind of exploded from stone formations, which is often how they grow in laboratories or in nature. And then I started looking at the way water hits rocks and hits rock faces, it has this big projectile feel to it that was similar to the way crystal growth exploded outward from its base. I thought there was something really dynamic there, something kind of reaching toward the sky with this sense of acceleration….then I literally took this gorgeous photo from the 1950s or 60s of a big wave hitting a rock, and it soars up 50 feet in the air over the top of this little gentleman. He’s like a little ant in the photo. And I cut it out and I pasted it onto this flat, snowy landscape. And I thought there was something beautiful, sharp, and striking about that. We did 40 or 50 other versions of how crystals could come together to make a Fortress, but that idea was the first one that I led with when I showed James ideas, and immediately he said, “That’s our Fortress.”
Costume Designer Judianna Makovsky
How did you approach creating Superman’s suits?
Well, the one thing we didn’t want was a sculpted fake body. Right off the bat, he didn’t want to see the fake muscles coming through. He said he wanted clothing that is a uniform, as opposed to some magical, made-of-weird-fabric suit. So I think that was where we started. He kept saying it’s more of a uniform, and he puts it on like anyone gets dressed to go to work. And I think that was where we started on our illustrations. James was very clear from the beginning which S-Shield he wanted to use, and it actually came from DC, from Kingdom Come. It’s tweaked a little, but it is that S. I like it because it’s very clean and very elegant and not fussy.
Visual Effects Supervisor Stephane Ceretti
What went into the making of the adorable Kyrpto the dog?
Krypto is heavily inspired by James’ dog, Ozu… It’s a very funny dog because it’s got this ear that pops up all the time, and he cannot really have his ear down. He’s a very, very cute dog, a little crazy. James kept calling him a bad dog, and I think that inspired James to put Krypto into the movie. The character of Krypto is Ozus’s shape, and the way he behaves is very much inspired by Ozu…
James was very keen on us understanding his dog more, so he filmed a ton of footage with Ozu at home and everywhere he was taking him, and scanned Ozu, and we shared it all with the animators at Framestore, who created the model based on him. Krypto is a slightly bigger dog, so we had to change the proportions, and then change the color of his fur and everything. But apart from that, the face, the eyes, the ears, all of that is really inspired by Ozu’s anatomy… and James was very precise in terms of what we were connecting with from the real-life Ozu to the movie Krypto.
It’s actually really complicated to try and get the right look, because when you build a CG character, you have to first build the surface and everything, then the fur, you have to groom the fur, and then the eyes had to be very precisely like Ozu’s eyes, so that we could get that kind of deadpan expression that he has…we didn’t want it to be a cartoonish character because he’s meant to be a dog. He doesn’t speak like we’ve done with previous characters that are animal-based. It required a lot of subtlety from all the animators at Framestore, and obviously, we shared that asset and some of the scenes with ILM and Weta, who all had to do the animation for Ozu, which makes it even more complicated because they needed to match the look of the fur, the body, the facial expressions and the animation styles. When you have to do it at three places because the dog is in a lot of scenes throughout the movie, then it’s even more complicated.
Composers John Murphy, David Fleming
How did the film history and comic book legacy influence the score of Gunn’s Superman?
John Murphy: That was the thing that was always at the front of my mind, because we knew quite early on that it was an amazing opportunity to start a whole new story and a whole new world, especially knowing that it was going to be borrowing more from the actual comic books rather than previous movies. That’s what the beautiful thing was, that I knew James was going back to the well. And we both had this love of John’s original score…
We wanted to show our love for it. It’s an amazing, iconic score, and we both were on board from the get-go. But, the challenge then, obviously, is when you have something that precious, let’s not overuse this. Let’s find the perfect moments, let’s be respectful. That was the difficult thing, because the amount of times I thought, are we overdoing this now? Or should I be really playing that on electric guitar? Am I going to composer hell for this? [LAUGHS] There was a lot of second-guessing and wondering if we were being respectful enough.
David Fleming: This Superman is very much a James Gunn film, it is singular in that way. But I think there is something about the spirit of that original movie that obviously touched James and that he has embraced, which includes the DNA of John Williams’s incredible theme. There’s something that Williams really captured about Superman’s inherent goodness and optimism that is inextricable from the character, so I knew figuring out how to use that iconic theme in a way that fits our film was key to helping James harness the spirit he was after.
I remember one particular meeting with James where I started playing around on the piano, exploring the back half of the Williams theme, which up to that point we hadn’t really utilized. As I was playing different variations, it felt like we were discovering something classic and new at the same time. I could tell it affected James, and it quickly became the musical key to Clark’s throughline in this film as he confronts his own purpose on Earth. What I love about this movie is the same thing I love about the original theme: how it taps into the heart and humanity of the character, not just as Superman, but as Clark Kent.
Superman flies into theaters July 11, 2025.
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Featured image: Caption: DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
